You may recall the story from Lithuania in late March 2025 about four soldiers, “part of the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division [who] were on a tactical training exercise when they and their vehicle went missing, the Army said.
“Lithuanian, Polish, and U.S. soldiers and rescuers searched through the forests and swamps at the Gen. Silvestras Žukauskas training ground in the town of Pabradė, 6 miles (10 kilometers) west of the border with Belarus. The M88 Hercules armored vehicle was pulled from a peat bog.”
“Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausada, who attended the ceremony, expressed his condolences to the families of the soldiers and said the recovery operations, supported by international cooperation, were ‘the best proof of NATO’s invincibility.’
“‘Their readiness to be with us, as they say, in a difficult neighborhood, is the best proof of who our friends are today,’ Nauseda told reporters.
“‘We consider US soldiers in Lithuania as our own. The farewell ceremony once again demonstrated our society’s solidarity, respect, and gratitude to the Americans,’ the Lithuanian Defense Ministry said in a post on Facebook.”
Why?
But as The Atlantic and other media outlets reported, FOTUS “did not go to Dover, DE to receive the bodies of [the] four American servicemen killed in an accident while serving in Lithuania. He said he went to Florida, where he visited his Doral golf resort, which was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV golf tournament, and stayed at his Mar-a-Lago club, where many tournament fans and sponsors were staying, as private business took precedence over the business of the nation.”
Back in August 2024, he noted: “The country’s top civilian honor [Presidential Medal of Freedom] was ‘much better’ than its top military honor [Congressional Medal of Honor], because the service members who receive the latter are ‘in very bad shape’ or ‘dead’ — the latest in a yearslong pattern of inflammatory comments the former president has made about veterans as barbs over military service are being traded by both campaigns during a heated election.”
Not a one-off
When he “canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.”
He “rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, [he] said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.’ In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.
This does not highlight the “greatness” of America.
So when the regime initially floated the idea of a military parade, possibly tied to FOTUS’ 79th birthday, it did not go well. Yet, it’s still on, at $25 million to $45 million during severe budget cuts, while selling VIP tickets.
He likes playing the soldier, though. “The pictures authentically show [him] wearing the uniform of the New York Military Academy — a private boarding school in Cornwall, New York that [he] attended for high school — at his 1964 graduation ceremony. [He] shared this image to his own Facebook page in 2013 with the caption ‘Myself with mother and father at New York Military Academy. See, I can be very military. High rank!'”
On this Memorial Day weekend, I would ask FOTUS: Be more like the Lithuanians.